(Men’s bodies and men portrayed in sexual acts, so not to evereyone’s taste)
Encountered on Pinterest this morning, on the Pace Gallery online exhibitions site, “Peter Hujar: Cruising Utopia” (open from 6/30 to 8/3 in 2020), with this arresting photograph:
(#1) Jay and Fernando [Two Men in Leather Kissing], ca. 1966 (I’m an avowed fan of men kissing men, so this photo was guaranteed to get my rapt attention)
A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
(Charms of the male body, plus a striptease song, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks e-mail ad in my mailbox today, with this beautifully composed male figure:
[AMZ caption:] Let me entertain you … I’m very versatile
The actual ad copy (offering 35% off):
Missed out last time? Our once a year Long Johns sale is happening this weekend at DailyJocks.
These Helsinki Athletica Long Johns have SOLD OUT completely during the previous 3 seasons so don’t miss out!
Made from premium modal which forms to your skin for ultimate comfort, whilst showing off your best assets.
A follow-up to my 7/10 posting “Their satanic majesties re-imagined”, which was
A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band
(#1) Wayno’s character Zn… rather than a simple caricature of KFK [Kerry Fucking King — his self-chosen epithet — of the thrash metal band Slayer],
(#2) The actual KFK, complete with the sign of the hornsin Zn Wayno has created a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined — a nicer, more Wayno-friendly — rock star, as a kind of homage to the original. Discarding the original’s less savory characteristics (rather than exaggerating them), and so salvaging a vision of what KFK could have been. A lot less Slayer and a lot more Led Zeppelin.
(Orthogonal to all this, my posting also looked at the details of Wayno’s cartooning style)
Temporarily poleaxed by a long period of low air pressure — not dead yet, just not functioning at all well — I’m posting a little thing from the most recent issue (July 8 & 15, 2024) of the New Yorker:
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
Pandora’s disastrous opening, in mythical times, of the box containing all the evils that beset mankind comes round again in her opening the comments section on her laptop, thus freeing all the vileness of the human spirit. As it was once, so must it be again.
A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band:
(#1) [from this posting, with emphasis added:] Wayno could have picked some specific heavy metal band and caricatured them for this cartoon, but he hasn’t done that here, at least not in any straightforward way: Zn is depicted as a heavy-metal acoustic guitarist who’s bald, darkish-skinned, wears dark sunglasses, and has a droopy gray mustache, and I’m pretty sure there is no such guy in real life.
I searched for several hours for candidates as the model for the character Zn in the real-life world of heavy-metal performance, but emerged empty-handed. Then David Preston commented on Facebook and made me re-think my search; maybe what Wayno was doing was not a simple caricature of someone from real life, but the creation of a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined character, as a kind of homage to the original. Relatable to the original, but significantly different from it. In which case, DP and I had a clear candidate for the source of Zn in #1.
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):
(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue; the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.
My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.
According to the calendar on my computer, today is St. Arnold’s Day, and it is — just not the St. Arnold (the patron saint of hop-pickers and brewers, born in Flanders, now Belgium, around 1040 and died there in 1087) I had in mind, whose feast day is August 14. An earlier version of the beery St. Arnold’s Wikipedia page had him confused with St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler (a musician — harpist and singer — who served at the court of Charlemagne and died around 800), whose feast day is in fact July 8 — though the current version of his Wikipedia page has a typo in which his feast day is listed as July 18.
But most of St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler’s story seems to be florid invention, with only a few solid facts known about him, while St. Arnold (Lat. Arnoldus) or Arnoul of Soissons (in northwestern France), aka Arnold or Arnulf of Oudenburg (in Flanders), had a fairly well-documented life full of event and accomplishment, so today I’m going to write about him, again, anyway.
(Talk about men’s genitals, so not to everyone’s taste; it’s coming up fast, so if you want to avert your eyes, do it now)
For the 4th of July, welcoming us to the swimming pool, he’s projecting amiable niceness while exhibiting his attractive swimmer’s body, utterly naked, with that patriotic beach ball nestled against his thick pornstar penis. Which is amiably hanging straight down, as unobtrusively as possible for such a hefty professional tool, but still one of the focal points of the composition (alas, fuzzed out for WordPress modesty). He’s working his porn-actor skills to hawk Gay Room’s 4th of July 50%-off sale on their many videos. And he’s a sweet thing to see at the beginning of a hot summer day, even if it’s just in the day’s Hunt eZine mailing (for Falcon | NakedSword studios):
(Moves quickly into the male body and man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Terrible days in the heat, barely functioning, while I accumulate promises to write on various topics, praise scholars of note, and follow up on earlier postings. So I’m feeling singularly inadequate — have in fact reached the point of taking a posting, any posting, off the gigantic heap of things in preparation, just to get something, anything, done. (Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be cheered that the day is predicted to be “much cooler” than yesterday — a high of merely 86F instead of 98F. That would still leave me breathless, profoundly exhausted, and unable to think clearly. I did go out at 6:30 am to water the plants in the cool of the morning, to protect them from heat death, and that actually was pleasant. Now I’m just avoiding going outdoors.
In any case, this is bringing you a follow-up to my 5/11/24 posting “The gay handshake”, which was about the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. Today it’s the penis as gay scallop shell, on (images of) cocks as a gay equivalent of (images of) scallop shells — penises as a design motif in decor. Dicks treated like not only scallop shells, but also thistles, dolphins, pineapples, roses, tigers, bumble bees, lilies, elephants, and peacock feathers (and many other things) as figurative motifs. Alongside more abstract motifs, like the fleur-de-lis, Greek key, quatrefoil, genital triad, Chinese knot, chevron, star, and paisley motifs. And color motifs, like the Princeton orange and black, the Ohio State scarlet and gray, and the gay rainbow flag colors.
